This year the Easter bunny dropped off an iPad for the family. The bunny brought home the basic wireless version with 32 GB of memory. What is the iPad good for? The wife says she’ll use it for banking and Facebook. The kid wants to play games and watch iTunes movies. I saw the iPad, and right off, I knew what I could use it for. For several years I have always used the Hypertext d20 SRD to get a quick ruling for 3.5e Dungeons and Dragons, I do the same for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game with the Pathfinder SRD. In both cases, I needed a computer nearby, and sometimes having the computer close also meant loss of table space. I am one of those game masters that prefers to not hide behind a screen so I also do not like the laptop on my table because it is big, bulky and cumbersome to handle. When the laptop is on, it blocks my view of the players. My laptop is kinda expensive and almost always needs to be near a power socket. The iPad starts up way faster and has nearly 10hours of battery life which is longer than the average game day for me. I usually only play 4-6 hour games. I see the iPad as the perfect little tool for gaming especially if you blog and use that blog to pass info to your users. I can edit all my art and maps on my big machines and upload to my website, or place them in iPhoto and either browse to the blog or sync to iPad via iTunes.
With the iPad, I can show drawings and maps from my website by passing it around the table or holding it in any orientation and still get the info out. I could print it out, but now I have the option of saving a tree or two. I figure I will also save big bucks on ink. I can search the web or SRD websites for rules research quickly. I figure the price will drop next year or later because the first question everyone asks is does it have a camera? I figure Apple will phase that in with higher memory units.
I think the iPad will make a great GM tool. The wife is searching for decent dice rollers right now.
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About shent_lodge
I’d love to hear updates as you get some experience with it. I opted for a netbook instead, because it allowed me to run combat-management software, which I’ve found very helpful (for 4e D&D.) It’s pretty small, has a 10 hour battery, and a 250 GB drive.
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I’ll post more as I get it more functional for gaming. I plan to put the pdf versions of my Pathfinder books on the iPad. We will test the dice rollers tomorrow night. It would be cool to have that magnet initiative tracker reworked for the iPad.
I’d love to hear/see how the Pathfinder PDFs work on the iPad – one of the big reasons I’m lusting for one is to read and use various RPGs I have on pdf, especially the full color ones.
A kind of dumb question: Did it come out of the box, ready to run or did you have to charge the battery and set-up with iTunes?
.-= MJ Harnish´s last blog ..Painting Miniatures: Paints, inks & additives, oh my! =-.
@MJ The iPad came fully charged out of the box. I Just plugged it into my computer with USB to talk to iTunes. I did get an application to upload pdfs and put my personalized copy of Pathfinder RPG and the Bestiary on it. Last night, I gamed and used it. First big thing to notice bad about the iPad was that there is no calculator… Odd, I guess there is an app for that. The pdf app. was called Goodreader and it works ok, once I figured out how to upload a pdf to the iPad via wireless. You have to be on your wireless network and connect via a web browser from a computer on that same network and then you can upload the pdf.
The setup info for the iPad was a one pager, about a big as a post card; picture on one side, and printed on the other was, basically: “Connect USB to computer with iTunes”.
i am planning to buy an iPad since it looks lighter than a regular desknote and i don not use much of the features of a laptop.~-.
@Melanie, That the real reason we bought one, it does just enough to be really useful around the house. Using it for RPG gaming ended up being an added bonus. We found you just have get used to the odd quirks like no flash player or calculator, though you can use safari and google for math problems.
Jon